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From: Ben Hyde
To: "'new-httpd@apache.org'"
Subject: RE: Upgrade of the SNMP module for Apache 1.2.5
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 15:23:28 -0500
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In our main product here we spent a mess of time providing a shared
memory
transport layer (along with our Decnet, TCP, and Appletalk support)
since
customers (and we too) were convinced it would improve performance. It
didn't,
the performance improvement was marginal over TCP. Most all the vendors
do a fine job of intrahost TCP. We didn't ship it. Of course we still
were doing
the message stream packing/unpacking.
Don't forget that there isn't a shared memory implementation on WIN for
Apache
yet.
Inspite of that I still thought shared memory was cool, and so my
original
plan for my Apache module was a small plugin (call it mod_satilite) and
a outboard process to do the "real work" of the module. The shared
memory
would presumably provide a quick way to get the request and server data
structures over to the outboard process.
That turns out to be hard since you really need most of src/libmain.a to
get up a head of steam. (libmain.a has main in it (ugh)). Then you
still
have the problem that N threads and N processes all need to get into
the outboard process so it's opening a lot of "blackboards." So I
backed
up and built my "mod_satilite" to tcp/ip to the worker process and I
run a vanilla message stream into it where it chews and chews away.
These are the kinds of things the phrase "we need something
more than just a shared memory abstraction, don't we?" brings to my
mind.
- ben h.